“The eye that cried women” by the audiovisual iconoclast María Cañas for the XIV Sevilla Festival

Thursday 07 de September

“This is European cinema”. The Seville Festival is tackling its fourteenth edition by sending a clear, forceful message that accompanies the work “The eye that cried women” by the audiovisual iconoclast María Cañas. The artist aligns herself with the festival’s spirit in her appeal “for the constant reformulation and evolution of European cinema as a cultural vehicle”; an essential, defining, decisive characteristic of the works by the directors who participate in the Seville festival. The festival’s poster, like all the work by this creator, is a commitment to the recovery of the audiovisual archive as a tool for cultural development and to the need to educate in the stirring and recycling of our collective imaginations, in order to nurture spectators who are freer, more critical and more creative, which is precisely what the Seville Festival aims to do each year with its programming.

“The Seville Festival’s poster symbolises the incandescent spirit of cinema in resistance. It is an ocular birth where a heroine re-emerges from the fire and ashes of celluloid like a phoenix. It’s the cinema-eye that is always reinventing itself, celluloid in flames in an eternal loop that is constantly renewing itself!, said Cañas, one of the best known Seville artists on the international scene for her wide ranging multi-disciplinary creation which goes from installation to pictorial expression, and in particular for her special, unique concept of audiovisual work.

With a biography full of terms coined for her self-definition, María Cañas is a media savage, a pyromaniac of minds, a videopathwho practises videoguerrilla inserting herself in clichés and genres to dynamite them. Her wide artistic and audiovisual creation has been exhibited in a multitude of festivals such as: MIRA, Brazil. Muta, Peru. Mar del Plata, Argentina. Cali, Colombia. Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York. Prestigious national and international museums and galleries such as C.A.A.C, SCAN, London. Centre D´Art Contemporain Geneva, Switzerland or MAMBA, Buenos Aires. The Seville European Film Festival dedicated a retrospective to her in 2013.

María Cañas has not only shown her work at the festival, she has also been a faithful spectator, edition after edition: “I have discovered, been surprised by and enjoyed many directors at the Seville European Film Festival, such as Agnès Varda, Rita Azevedo, Vivienne Dick, Gustav Deutsch, Kurdwin Ayub, Kikol Grau, Ben Rivers, Peter Tsherkassky, Juan Sebastián Bollaín, Yorgos Lanthimos, Leos Carax, Ulrich Seidl, Miguel Gomes, José Luis Guerin… the list is endless”. In the image for this edition of the festival, full of color and retro-futuristic style, the archivist of Seville has sought inspiration precisely in the experimental genre. From the transgression of the pulp fiction of the 20s with its emphasis on adventure, intrigue, fantasy stories and mythological beings from a paranormal or magical panorama, to her findings and discoveries at the Seville Festival itself.